


Kill Your Darlings

by thermodynamic (euphoriaspill)



Series: Chaos Theory [4]
Category: The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Genre: Discussion of Abortion, Drug Abuse, Future Fic, Hippies, Infidelity, M/M, Marijuana, POV Second Person, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Step-parents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2019-06-24 13:43:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15631854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/euphoriaspill/pseuds/thermodynamic
Summary: If this is sick, Ponyboy doesn’t want to be well.





	1. Bravado

_December 1969_

 

"What a crock of  _shit_." Randy throws the door open so hard it slams into the adjacent wall, chipping the paint. "So  _Terry_  can have three fucking girlfriends at the same time and call it 'free love',  _Ken's_  cruisin' down to Will Rogers for jailbait and says age is just a number, but two men kissin', yeah, that's where we better draw the moral line."

You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from smiling, though there's nothing very funny about the situation. Randy hardly ever cusses, a side effect of being raised Soc, thinks he's too damn  _posh_  for that; it's always worth a good laugh whenever his tongue trips over the words.

Another side effect is that every injustice feels brand new. "I dunno why you're so surprised," you say, putting aside the dog-eared copy of On the Road you'd been flipping through. "Ain't like the rest of the world's exactly linin' up to march for queer rights."

"What the hell kind of commune is this?" Randy kicks the bedpost hard enough to break his toe, then erupts into another string of curses. "They'll listen to the Velvets, sure, they'll drop acid, they'll burn their draft cards, then they see somethin'  _really_  provocative and that's just not groovy anymore. They wanna smash the system, but they won't say a word against the sodomy laws."

You never intended to stay here as long as you did— only packed a duffel bag of mostly underwear and a few battered, water-stained paperbacks when you stormed out of  _Darry's_  house— and you sure as shit never bought into the ideals Randy ascribed to this VW Beetle of misfits and malcontents, united by a love of quality grass more than any love of justice. "We're outlaws. Excitin', ain't it?"

(You thought you'd left crime behind you sometime before Curly Shepard went inside, robbing you of the devil on your shoulder, but here you are, risking two to ten if any of your so-called comrades nark. Maybe there's more of your daddy in you than you like to admit.)

"Didn't you read about the riots at Stonewall, in New York?" He flops down next to you; as if you don't remember the pictures in the newspaper, the bricks thrown through the windows, the strange, stirring hope that rose out of you like a flower blooming from concrete. "The times are a-changin', Pone, just not here. Not in this lousy hick city."

Randy looks around the room you share— the worn mattress, the dreamcatcher with half the beads fallen out, the stubs of joints littering the floor— and sets his jaw. "Let's get outta here."

You let out a laugh, a hopscotch step to incredulity. "C'mon, you can't be serious. An' go where, exactly?"

"Somewhere a little more 'Puff the Magic Dragon' than 'Okie from Muskogee.'"

"You plan on suckin' dick on the side of the road?" you say with the smart mouth that's gotten you into trouble your whole life. You're three years younger, but at times like these (or when you learned Randy can't do his own laundry), you feel a hundred years more jaded. "'Cause your daddy ain't about to pay for this, and Darry sure as  _shit_  won't."

Instead of looking crushed by this influx of practicality, Randy just studies you, the green flecks in his hazel eyes standing out even more starkly than usual. "You're a brilliant writer, you know. Ain't a lot of fourteen-year-old kids who could create somethin' like that theme."

"You can quit gassin' me up," you start, your brows rising past your hairline, "it ain't about to work—"

His lips curl into a smirk before you can finish the sentence. "Oh, I ain't gassin' you up. You're  _stagnating_  artistically. Admit it. You ain't produced anything close to that in years— you're scared to even try."

God, do you want to deck him, your blood aflame inside your veins, but the worst part is that he's  _right_. Since the tenth grade, you've got three salvageable poems, a godawful play about your breakup with Cathy that ripped off Cat on a Hot Tin Roof like nobody's business, and a half-baked novel whose sensitive, artistic protagonist is so much like you, even you want to puke. "Fuck you—" his smirk only grows wider— "you don't see me makin' fun of your sorry-ass folk-pop album—"

"We've milked all the creative inspiration outta this place," Randy says with a grand sweep of his hand, looking at you the way Neal Cassady must have looked at Allen Ginsberg once. "I mean. You could stay. Go to college like your brother wants, get some business degree, do what you're supposed to do." His hand snakes over to your thigh, gives it a tight squeeze. "But I want you to come with me."

You haven't seen Darry since September, and your mind recoils from the memory like it's a hot stove.  _You need help, Ponyboy,_  he said as you smoked cigarette after cigarette on the porch until your fingertips reeked of nicotine,  _you need to go to a doctor, you're_ _sick_ _. Before you end up some useless burnout like Uncle Gene._

You knew, despite what the DSM claimed, that nothing would ever fix the desire coiled inside you. Letting your hair grow out long, kissing boys, and writing so, so much bad poetry felt like waking up again, coming back alive.  _If I'm sick,_  you said slowly,  _I don't want to be well._

The two of you waged a million wars that summer you graduated high school, about what your father would have wanted, how much Darry sacrificed for your sake, what to do about Soda (who only shows up at home anymore, reeking like death and as gaunt as an Auschwitz survivor, to beg for cash), but unlike the strum und drang of all the others, this one smacked of a quiet finality— there was nothing left to say, really, after that. There's nothing left of your family anymore, really, just ghosts and ashes and photographs, collapsing like moth's wings with the slightest touch.

You lean over and press your lips to the juncture between his neck and shoulderblade, inhale the smell of marijuana and patchouli that clings to all his sweaters; he cups your face in his hands and kisses you hard, his stubble against your skin more right than any caress from Cathy. "You're fucking crazy," you make sure to tell him, but as you say it you already know you've lost. "We ain't got no money, we ain't got no plan—"

"Hey, we got our health, and—" he slings an arm around your shoulders— "we got each other, right? Better than stickin' around here 'til the draft board comes knockin'."

You love him, that's the trouble, like a cat licking up antifreeze, sweet and enticing before it melts your insides. Maybe you've loved him since you first stuck out your tongue and let him put an acid paper on it, since you started staying up all night fucking and reading excerpts from  _Howl_ , since he barreled into your room and forced you to examine a world outside the confines of your neighborhood. You've lost so many people; no matter what it costs you, you can't face the possibility of festering here while he drives off alone.

"We're takin' my car," you say, fumbling around for the keys on your nightstand. "I am  _not_  listenin' to what you call a cassette the whole way there."

The two of you settle on singing along to the Kinks, loudly, off-key, until you see the fog come up over San Francisco. You refuse to look back, not even once.


	2. Reefer Madness

You can't get a motel room for two men with only one bed.

Of course, a stupid, reckless part of you is tempted to try— maybe you could pull it off, pretend to be brothers or incredibly cheap businessmen, stare down the bossy clerk with the long, acrylic nails who says color TV is an extra three bucks a night. But a numb fear that coils around your intestines is what drives you to say, yes, of course, you want  _twin_  beds, what else?

You look too suspicious to risk it, with your long, shaggy locks, your fringed vests, the dirty hemp bracelets slung around your wrists. But after the door locks behind you, without exchanging a word, you both collapse on the same mattress, side by side, bodies touching. You can scarcely breathe, your chest constricted with a mixture of excitement and fear; the feeling of holyshitholyshitholyshit, the gleeful, stupid joy of escape, still hasn't come close to fading.

"Haight-Ashbury's gonna be different," you promise Ponyboy, threading your hands through his hair— you've always loved the color, a red the color of rust, fallen leaves in the autumn. "It's where people like  _us_  live, you know, people on the outskirts."

You're exhausted to the bone after nine hours of driving, and you've only gotten as far as Santa Fe; your eyelids hang low, like they're weighed down with cement. You almost don't hear him say, "What the hell are we gonna  _do_?"

God, you hate yourself sometimes, getting involved with this eighteen-year-old kid and now hauling him thousands of miles away from home— for all of his brother's scolding about how Ponyboy never uses his head, he's always been the more practical half of the two of you. You can hear your dad's voice worming inside your mind, calling you a dumbass— your  _stepdad_ , a nasty part of you wants to correct, but that's a copout when he raised you from the age of two, and you've never been much good at cheating. Do you plan on bummin' around for the rest of your life, son? he asked you a couple weeks ago, smoke curling around his pipe— Mother's always nagging him to quit doing it in the house. You got so much more  _potential_  than this.

You called him a lousy square who didn't understand the spirit of your generation, he called you a lazy hophead, you ended up clapping each other on the back and cracking open a couple of beers at the end of the night. But the argument never got settled, and you can only imagine what he's going to throw at you when you call home and tell him where you are, and that you don't plan on coming back.

"I got a plan," you whisper, as though the walls of this lousy fleabag motel have ears and are planning to bust you right after you say the word. Traffic rushes by outside, every tire skid and slam on the brakes a nail hammered into your skull. "It won't sell for a lot, but that grass we got stashed in the backseat—"

He jumps out of the bed like you just burned him. " _That_  was your brilliant idea?" he demands, his mouth twisted into an ugly snarl. "Becoming traveling drug dealers?"

You're so surprised by the vehemence of his reaction, all you can do is laugh. "Man, you'll smoke this stuff by the ton— where do you think it comes from? What's the problem?"

He flashes you a look of ineffable hurt. "My old man sold drugs." He pulls his knees to his chest and scoots away from you, his back against the wall. "Okay? Before he died... he was a huge dealer on our side of town, even went to prison for a couple years when I was a kid. I ain't turnin' out like him."

"I didn't know," you say uselessly, because maybe it's the only thing you can say. "How was I supposed to know, huh?"

Ponyboy keeps so much of himself coiled up, like a spring about to go off; you knew Bob better than anyone in the world did, more than his absent father or neurotic mother or nagging big brother ever could or wanted to, and now you're trapped inside the kind of painful flashbulb memory you thought you'd left behind at eighteen.

He was bragging about going all the way with Norma Holden, the summer after eighth grade, and you  _so_  wanted to call bullshit— Norma wasn't even a greasy chick, but a Soc like you, whose daddy owned a whole chain of car washes. But you never learned how to stand up to Bob, a spinelessness that would eventually cost him his life. "I ain't ever gettin' kissed," you'd whined instead, kicking your feet hard enough in his pool to splash him a little. "I'm gonna be a thirty-year-old virgin, at this rate."

So he leaned over and kissed you, just like that, a brief rush of electricity that almost made you lose your grip and fall in. "There," he said, his palm wet and warm against your bare torso, "now will you quit bitchin' already? Mother, we want lemonade," he called in the direction of his massive house, like what he did was nothing particularly special.

Rules never applied to Bob until there was a switchblade through his chest, and suddenly you're transported back to the present, with the boy who could've killed him. He's thrown open the narrow window and lit up a cigarette, staring out at the empty landscape, and the whole room feels hot and tight with tension.

"Dammit, Pony, don't be such a kid," you say and then feel like shit for saying it, but not quite shit enough to apologize. You're glad he's not looking at you right now; his eyes, luminous green, are too old for his face, and they judge like Christ risen up from the dead. "Money don't just grow on trees— we gotta do  _somethin'_  for it."

"Don't be such an ass," he shoots back at you just as quickly. "You know how many people have told me that? My daddy, both my brothers, my sister— they all had good reasons. Until they started doin' it for bad ones."

"It ain't like that, we ain't gonna start some  _cartel_ ," you say, a swan song for your proposition. "A few ounces sold, we got enough for first month's rest, food to eat, is all."

You say 'first month's rent' and 'food to eat' like those are concerns you've ever had in your life. He can tell. "You don't know some of the shit I saw growin' up— you ain't got no idea." His words hit you like bullets from a machine gun, shot without any regard for the target. "My daddy brought gangbangers into the kitchen— he hid his stash in Darry's room, for fuck's sake. My mama had to work two jobs so the bank wouldn't take the house when he went inside. My sister got a hit put on her by the head of the Kings after Dallas made her deal." He stubs out the cigarette with enough force to leave an ashy burn hole on the windowsill. "I'm never gonna be that kind of person, so if that's what you want— then just take your car and go on without me."

"Okay," you exhale, though the money you managed to withdraw from your bank account isn't exactly an eternal spring. The thought of losing him is enough to freeze you solid, make you abandon all your self-righteous pontificating. "Okay, we'll think of something else. No dealin'. I promise."

Instead of saying anything, he just lights up another smoke— you swear that kid's gonna die of cancer before 'Nam or a gaybashing ever get to him. "You gonna sleep on your twin-size over there, then?" you say, meaner and lower than you intended. "Givin' me the old silent treatment?"

When he barely turns his head to give you a withering look, your anger deflates like a punctured balloon— you walk over to where he's standing and reach up past the hem of his shirt, an unsubtle advance. Run your hand down his spine, his skin soft against your palm, until you hit the dimples at the base of his back. "I love you. Let's don't fight."

He strikes like a snake— shoves his tongue down your throat, fists your hair in one hand, gets the other down your pants. Your poet boy, your golden boy, he's not in the mood for words right now.

You never do make it to either of the beds.


	3. The Element of Surprise

I shouldn't be here.

_The house smells different now, a cross between sour milk and baby powder, and it's littered with all of Frannie's toys that Jasmine can't keep picked up, rattles, alphabet blocks, the stuffed bear you gave her for her baptism. You hate the sick wave of resentment that washes over you whenever you think about her— she's a child, none of this is her fault— but Darry said he didn't want your lifestyle around her and you know he doesn't just mean the pot. That's why you don't feel very guilty about raiding his bathroom cabinets._

" _Put it back, this house ain't no goddamn Woolworth's." Darry's demand slices through your thoughts. "Though I guess those dirty hippies you live with could use the soap."_

" _State of Oklahoma says you have to provide for me 'til I'm eighteen," you say unwisely._

" _Oh, is that how you wanna play it? 'Cause I'll drag you right back home by the ear,_ Ponykid _." The menacing look he gives you would've made you piss yourself when you were thirteen. "You're damn lucky I got my hands too full with Frannie and Peter Pan to deal with you."_

_You bristle at the casual slight to Sodapop, though you can hardly believe that scab-covered zombie and your charming, happy-go-lucky brother were once the same person. "You know, you were way less of a dick before your wife left you."_

" _Lil' buddy, in a minute, we can take this outside."_

_Maybe it'd help if you really did breach your disconnect by beating the hell out of each other, physically grapple with the rage and disappointment, but the threat has no teeth, Darry would never hit you again. "I shouldn't have come back here," you say, shoving past him to get to the door, "it always ends the same way, don't it?"_

" _I didn't work two jobs to keep you in school for this teen angst bullshit." His words wrap around you like kudzu, pulling you back in. "Throwin' away college, smokin' dope all day in that drug den, ruinin' your future... are you_  depressed _, do you need a shrink?" His voice takes on a harder edge. "Do you need your ass whooped, is that what you're tryna do, get me to stop you?"_

_You're not sure if it's funnier that Darry thinks he could send you to a shrink and get a clean-cut prep schooler back, or that you'd stand still long enough for him to whoop you straight— in both senses of the word. "Well, you ain't my fucking daddy," you throw out as a cheap insult, even though when you try to picture him anymore, Darry's face is all you see. "You can't make me do nothin'."_

" _I know." He sounds like there's a hand around his throat. "If Dad was here, you never would've turned out like this."_

You wake up to a familiar ache between your legs, but it doesn't hurt, exactly— like the burn of a well-stretched muscle, back in your track days. Randy's arm is slung around you, pulling you into his chest, but right now its weight feels more confining than comforting, the blanket around your chin a stranglehold. You disentangle yourself from his grip and the arm flops forward; you can't resist smiling a little, at how he takes up the whole bed as though he owns it.

Still doesn't stop you from pulling on a sweatshirt and heading down the stairs, on the prowl for the nearest payphone. You don't want to wake him, not after the argument you had earlier— the tips of your ears heat up at the memory, and not just because of how you two made up... acrobatically... in every corner of the room. Maybe you shouldn't have been such a judgemental prick, the way you can be so often. Maybe he's right, you  _are_  naive, you don't know what you're doing, maybe one bag wouldn't have harmed much.

December in Santa Fe is cold, colder than you expected, and you shiver in the lobby as the doors slide open and let a blast of freezing air in, along with a drunk, handsy couple— "the desert ain't always hot like the pits of hell, Ponykid," your daddy told you once, "the heat seeps right out at night and then you're livin' in an icebox." He grew up in Mescalero, not far from here, and his ghost haunts you as you survey this seedy motel and think about your options. Is he the mental voice telling you to drive on in the morning, try to hit Phoenix by tomorrow night? Or the one that points out every passing truck with its headlights on, a way to get home to Tulsa before Randy notices you're gone?

With your luck, he's the one calling you a faggot.

You dial the number to pull yourself out of your own head. "Hey, Mrs. Shepard," you say just to be an ass, once the operator connects you back to Oklahoma.

"I'm gonna kill you," Jasmine immediately snaps, "why're you even callin'? You need money, Darry says he's gonna shoot you if you come in the house to loot again. I don't think he's kiddin'— the sleep deprivation with Frannie is really killin' him. He might just think you're a burglar."

"Why, I'm doin' great, and how are you, sister dear?"

"I'm six months pregnant, my old man's doin' time, and I'm still livin' with  _Darry_." Her sigh could level ocean waves. "How the fuck do you  _think_  I am, Pone?"

"Yeah, about that..." You scratch the place where your hair's starting to stick up in wisps around your ears. "Curly doin' okay in the big house?"

"Keeps callin' me up, askin' for cash, wants to buy more smokes at the commissary," she says. "He's just fine. I'm the one who needs a nice stiff drink."

" _Jasmine_ —"

"Relax, choir boy, the doctor already gave me the lecture. Showed me some pictures of mongoloid kids whose mamas boozed it up during the pregnancy." You swear you hear the sound of a lighter flicking to life, as though cigarette smoke is a better thing to expose that baby to— it's blighted enough with the Shepard genes making up its DNA. (Curtis, too, who are you trying to fool.) "Shit, you wanna be worried 'bout substances, you got the wrong sibling."

"... You seen Soda lately?"

She lets out a humorless snort. "If he shows up here again, Darry won't be threatenin' to shoot him, he'll just pull out the heater— an' we all know he's a good shot." Darry's grown a lot less tolerant of Soda since he broke Jasmine's wrist after she wouldn't give him five bucks; oddly enough, it hasn't seemed to have affected Jasmine's opinion of him. "I haven't seen much of  _you_  lately, lil' bro, where you been hidin'? Still tryna be Tulsa's Wavy Gravy?"

"In Santa Fe."

" _What_?" She cusses under her breath, probably burned herself with the cigarette. "The hell are you doin' in New Mexico? You and the gang decide to head over to the desert, smoke a little peyote, and commune with the dead?"

"Randy an' I—"

"Oh, don't say anythin' else," she says with a disgusted scoff in the back of her throat. "Christ, of course  _he_  dragged you down there, what did I expect."

"I dunno why you hate him so much—"

"'Cause I caught the two of you swappin' spit," she says, taking the bait without any hesitation— you can always count on good old Jasmine Eugenia for that. "Next thing you know, you've moved into the world's shittiest excuse for a hippie commune and you're suckin' dick for acid. Then you wonder why I hate that guy."

"Sure you ain't talkin' about yourself, sis?"

Back home, she would've taken a swing at you— none of you Curtises have ever been famous for your even tempers, especially not Jasmine, and you two were scrapping well into your teenage years. You still have a small scar on your forehead where she'd raked her nails across it. "It's unnatural, Pony," she says instead like a Sunday school lesson learned by heart, "it's not right, c'mon, you  _know_  that. Everyone knows that. Maybe if you went to a doctor, you'd go back to college—"

Darry shipped her off to a shrink after he found out about Graham and Joe, and now she thinks those quacks hand out some kind of magical elixir that cures any sexual deviancy, including just being a damn queer. "Did I give you this shit for fuckin' everything on legs?"

"Oh, right, now we got the reason why Saint Ponyboy wrote me out of his book— the slutty sister character didn't have enough audience appeal." She scoffs even louder. "You are  _just_  like Mom, you know? Ready to point out the speck of dust in anyone else's eye, but—"

"Don't you dare. Don't you fucking  _dare_  say it."

"Say what... half-brother?"

You can't even reply, the breath knocked out of your lungs like the time you climbed a tree and fell right off the top branches. Your daddy had found you then, you remember, bundled you into the truck, smoothed your sweaty bangs off your forehead and told you everything would be all right, though setting your arm on a roofer's salary must've cost him a fortune. If he even  _was_  your daddy.

"I'm sorry, Pone," she says, her voice trembling. "I didn't— you got red hair like Aunt Rose, like her daddy. I didn't mean it."

"Forget it." You breathe hard, almost choking on your inhales. "You didn't say anything Dad wasn't already thinkin'."

"Pone—"

"For Chrissakes, did I ever say I wanted to go to college?" You  _want_  to slam the receiver back down on the hook. Wasn't that the point of this whole excursion, huh, to abandon the last remaining scraps of attachment to your so-called family? "Darry's the one who was always pushin' it on me—"

But that's a cheap cop-out, the kind of thing some rich Soc would come up with, that your big brother just nagged so much he put you off higher education forever... a rich Soc like Randy, an unkind part of your brain supplies. The truth is, despite Darry's stern speech about living in a vacuum, that your life doesn't end just because you lose someone, well, it wasn't that fucking easy, was it? To cope with your parents and two of your best friends dying all in the span of one fucking  _year_ , the deaths you'd watched in  _person_ , and the harder you tried to take his advice, drown the pain in track and studying and everything he wanted you to be, the more you remembered that y'all's daddy had thought a nice tall bottle of whiskey could get the job done. Shit really went downhill right around the time you lost a brother, goddammit, that desperate psychopath bears no resemblance to the brother you once adored, and you still haven't recovered.

... Man, fuck Darry. He married his bitchy ex-girlfriend from high school just to dodge, had a baby he didn't even want, and now he's pretending he's Ward Cleaver? (You want to hate him for kicking Soda out, but deep inside of you, if you really examine yourself, you wouldn't keep this new Soda around your baby daughter either— the one with absolutely no filter between brain and mouth, who'll steal Frannie's formula and cut it on the street for another hit, who broke Jasmine's wrist behind her back when she wouldn't give him any more money to get wasted. Maybe there's more of him in you than you'd like to admit.)

"So you wouldn't end up goin' to Vietnam University, kid. You ever think of that?"

"I got drafted," you say tightly, "I think I have a pretty good idea."

She outright gasps. "You can't be serious—"

"Yeah, I'm dead fuckin' serious— I'm eighteen, my number got picked, they want me to do my duty for Uncle Sam."

"Pony, you ain't gonna—"

Sometimes, even though she's a year and a half older, though she'd probably call it misogynistic and dismiss it with a pointed eyeroll, you want to protect your sister. You don't  _like_  her much, maybe you never will, but you want to protect her all the same. "Don't worry, it's bad for the baby," you feebly try to joke. "I'll be fine, I burned my draft card— I ain't goin' nowhere. I seen what happened to Soda in that place."

"Darry tried to talk me into gettin' an abortion. Get rid of that damn baby."

" _What_?" She could've said she'd walked on the moon like Neil Armstrong and you would've believed that more easily. " _Our_  Darry? He won't even smoke a joint 'cause he thinks it kills brain cells, he wanted to send you to the back alley with them butchers?"

"They ain't  _butchers_ ," she says irritably, "it would've been at a hospital, a private one. It's a very common procedure." She sighs. "Curly flipped shit, though, turned real Catholic all of a sudden— said he wasn't gonna let Darry kill his baby, that he'd marry me, thought those two would have to take it outside. Well, you know how it goes from there."

You really do— most depressing wedding you've ever been to, hands down, and you got best man at Darry's by default. Soda made it to this one, but since he left halfway through to shoot up, you're not sure if that's much to celebrate; Curly's mother had a couple too many glasses of champagne and started shrieking about having a Protestant daughter-in-law; when the bride and groom got caught getting busy in a storage closet, you figured that was your cue to split.

"The baby." You imagine her eyes closed now, one hand on her swollen belly, as beatific and peaceful as the Virgin Mary. "I think I might call him Michael."

"After me?" you ask incredulously— you and your sister were never close growing up. You even wrote her out of your theme, for Chrissakes, because you blamed her for half of what happened in it. It'd be less surprising if she picked Darry.

"You're the best brother I got right now," she says with a harsh chuckle. "I ain't namin' him Patrick, that kid's got enough stacked against him already... and I ain't namin' him Darry either, he'd be the damn third one in the line." She makes a noise that sounds like stubbing out a cigarette— she must be on her fourth or fifth one by now. "I'm messin' with all of you, if I'm tellin' the truth. I wanted to call him Dally. But Curly flipped shit again, he ain't havin' none of it."

"You wanted to call his firstborn son after your ex-boyfriend, and you're surprised he wasn't jumpin' for joy?"

"He wanted to call our firstborn  _daughter_  after his goddamn druggie mother, cut me a break, I'm not gonna say Mary Shepard and look around to see which one it is. Not like an ex, like a brother. God knows he was better to me than any of my real brothers."

You do hang up, then, because what's there to say after that? What can you possibly say in your own defense, when you abandoned her and don't feel an ounce of remorse about it, won't even deny that all you feel is a rush of relief, like you've had a malignant tumor removed? "I got an idea," you tell Randy back upstairs, shaking him awake, "place where we can crash."

He furrows his brow, his eyes still glazed from sleep. "Didn't know you had connections out in the middle of nowhere."

"It ain't nowhere... I mean, kind of is, it's in the middle of the desert." You rake your hand through your hair and try to remember the grandmother you never knew, the arid heat, the cacti, and realize you're just extrapolating from your siblings' memories. "Let's go visit my uncle Gene."


	4. Contents Under Pressure

When Ponyboy's Uncle Gene gets him into a hug, you're not sure if he'll survive it.

"How's my Ponykid been doin', huh?" he declares, spinning him around before he finally deposits him back onto the floor, and you try as hard as you can to suppress your cringe. Yeah, yeah, it's heteronormative, it's based in antiquated gender roles, it's whatever the commune was against this week to seem like you didn't only exist to smoke grass and talk shit, but the last time your daddy folded you into his arms like that, you'd come home covered in fountain water and your best friend's blood, and that suited y'all just fine. Stumbling into Ponyboy's world, the casual wrestling matches, the elbows to the ribcage, the hair-ruffles, the  _hugs_ , you'd damn near had an aneurysm. " _Lord,_  I've missed you. You know you've always been my favorite."

"Jasmine's your favorite, she's the one named after you," Pony grouses, trying to smooth down his Brylcreem-infused hair with the complicated swirls he'd copied from Steve. He wanders onto the porch after a few moments of pleasantries, claims that he wants to take a look around, that he hasn't been around these parts since he was old enough to remember it, but you know he's uncomfortable with the exuberance of the affection. And you can't shake your absolute discomfort as you hover in the doorway, obviously not part of the gleeful reunion, the fifth leg on a stool you helped construct. You feel like a narcissist, you feel like a bad person, you tell yourself to cut it out, but Jesus, for the first time since you drove off (maybe even longer), you've shed the detachment you learned in the commune and wish you were with your own family right now.

You should call them.

Gene rinses plates in the sink; you can more than relate to the massive pile he's let build up, eating off of paper towels before you finally bite the bullet and pick up a sponge. There were roaches all over the communal kitchen, and you don't mean the good kind. Your left foot involuntarily kicks the rickety leg of his kitchen table, like you're a fidgety second-grader stuck in a church pew again; you watch his hands tremble, curl up into themselves, not quite clawed and yet not quite human.

"Are you and Ponyboy..." He splashes suds all over himself and laughs a little. "Man, I lived alone for goin' on ten years, I still can't wash a dish to save myself."

"I can't either," you confess guiltily, "you want me to be honest, my mama and my sister never did either. We have a maid at home."

"So did we, if I'm bein'  _real_  honest too." He shakes his head out like he's trying to get a tick off his hairline or something. He looks a lot like a couple of pictures Pony once showed you of his mother— blond, with an upturned nose, his bearing aristocratic even if his circumstances aren't. You recognize the same look from Bob's gait. "Shit, enough with these dishes already, you're supposed to be my guest." He pulls a bowl out from one of the cupboards. "You look like the kind of fella who smokes up, correct me if I'm wrong. That's one head of hair you're sporting."

"You bet," you say, mesmerized as he rolls the joint; Pony must've gotten his long, piano-player fingers from him, or you suppose from his mama. "Didn't know you would be."

" _Ha_." When he strikes a match against his belt buckle, he holds it up like Prometheus bringing fire down to earth, then lights the joint and leans back with a contended sigh. "Y'all hippie kids really think your generation invented drugs— they filmed Reefer Madness back in the thirties, son, don't get me started."

You take it and almost groan as the indica washes over your nerves like a warm bath. "So are you two... together? You don't have to play so coy," he adds when your heart starts pounding against the wall of your chest cavity, as your eyes flicker towards the nearest door. "I'm not going to do anything about it, Christ, I'm not like that. Relax. Just thought you and Ponykid might prefer to sleep in the same bed instead of sneakin' out in the middle of the night."

"He told me not to tell you." You count the number of tassels on the blanket he has hung up on the opposite wall, masking the peeling paint, to calm yourself back down—  _one, two, three, four._.. "He said you didn't take it real well when his mama married his daddy, 'cause he was Indian and all."

"Yeah, that's what he fed her," he says with a surprisingly bitter laugh, "I mean... it was a different time then, kid, I didn't like her marrying an Indian and no one else did either. But what I really didn't like was him being a gangbanging dealer, you know?" You pass him the joint— he seems to relax some himself after the influx of the memory, pull himself out of the past's stranglehold. "Your family, you tell them the truth yet?"

"I did." You swish the words around like wet ashes. "I mean, they ain't happy about it, who would be... my mama's crying all the time that I'm not gonna give her any grandkids, my daddy thinks I'm just tryna give him an aneurysm, it's just a phase, but they ain't tryna beat it out of me or nothin' like that. Pony's the one who got kicked out."

Gene's brows disappear up past the shaggy hair falling onto his forehead. "Darry threw him out on his ass? I was never his daddy's biggest fan, but Darrel never would've done that."

"Wasn't just the whole gay thing, I don't know." Your repressed upbringing rises to the surface again, making you uncomfortable with sharing Ponyboy's personal business while he's not in the picture— but this is his uncle, isn't it? "Probably the whole drug and anti-war and hippie thing, too. He didn't want to go to college, that really rubbed Darry the wrong way— he thinks he's a burnout. That was just the last straw."

"Your daddy, he more liberal, then? Fuck—"

"He ain't my daddy." Your tongue feels like a slab of meat in your mouth, too large for the confines of your cheeks. You tell yourself that it's the weed and the nervous energy that's making your mouth run like this to a total stranger, but maybe that's what made the prospect so appealing, the lack of judgement that can follow you around. A lifetime of emotional repression out in one go. "He's my stepdaddy. Not that anyone ever  _told_  me that much."

Gene does you the favor of leaning forward, his mouth an open O of surprise, at least feigning interest in your story. "The hell, man?"

"Yeah, he's my kid sister Marilyn's daddy, guess they thought he'd do for mine too." Expelling the truth feels like bloodletting during the Middle Ages, letting your black blood leak out of the vein. "My real one got hit by a truck when I was two. Never figured anything out until we had to do Punnett squares in biology and I realized I couldn't have gotten hazel eyes from two blue-eyed parents."

"That's messed." He reaches out to touch your elbow, his fingers branches coming off a gnarled tree. "They shouldn't have done that to you."

"It was the fifties, they didn't know any better— it was just what you did back then." You shrug like it's no big deal, because the sympathy makes you uncomfortable and itchy, because you channeled your pain into drinking too much whiskey and cruising around town with Bob hitting a hundred on the dash and jumping greaser boys for kicks— and you're not that person anymore, you've alchemized into someone better. At least, that's what you want to think. "My daddy— I got into a lot of trouble, after all that, my best friend died because of it. He's just glad I didn't end up six feet under, at this point."

You  _really_  should call them.

He blinks at you; you're not sure if it's the weight of your news or just the pot that's making him space out. "I don't get it." Your lungs seize up on a huff that's far too deep for your tolerance, who the hell do you think you are now— "If you're their uncle, why didn't you get custody of all those kids, instead of Darry? You're a lot older than him."

"I'm schizophrenic." He says it like he's announcing that he has blond hair, nothing to be proud or ashamed of, just part of his makeup. "That's why. The meds work sometimes, but every once in a while—"

"Oh God, I'm so—"

"You don't have to be sorry," he says briskly, shrugging off your Southern manners like a loose-fitting bathrobe, "doctor says I was born with it inside me— like sleepin' with a bomb under your mattress. Goin' to war and droppin' acid just lit the fuse a bit sooner than expected." He taps the ash off the tip of the joint. "It's pretty funny sometimes, honest. I once thought an alien knocked me up for three straight months once. My sister's husband was in prison, she had to figure out how to feed me and four kids, and the whole time I was talkin' her ear off 'bout the lil' extraterrestrial baby I had growin' inside me. She probably hoped I'd die in childbirth."

"That... ain't funny."

"You laugh or you cry, kid, that's just how the world works." He blows a mouthful of sickly-sweet smoke into your face, enough to make you breathe in deep and cough, enough to make him flash you a Cheshire cat grin. "At least I ain't my brother Don, you know? At least I ain't dead."

Pony is sitting out on Gene's massive, dusty porch, swirling some of his pungent moonshine around a chipped cup, occasionally lifting it to his mouth. The paleness of his skin makes him stand out like a blanched skeleton, against all the muddy red of the landscape, the color of dried blood; he hasn't changed clothes in the past three days. "Hey," he says. He looks like he's asleep with his eyes open, staring straight through you as he turns his torso. "It go all right with him?"

"I think we oughta get outta here." Restless energy pools in the pit of your stomach, makes you want to propel yourself off the stoop, load Ponyboy back inside your beat-up old Pinto, and hit the gas until this place recedes into the background. "Before it gets dark."

"We were gonna spend the night, at least— come on, I ain't seen Uncle Gene in years." Surprise rapidly cycles into suspicion. "Did somethin' happen? With you two?"

"I told him the truth, about us." The words feel like a lump of granulated sugar in the back of your throat, choking, scratching. "That we're together."

" _What_?" Caesar's voice echoes in your ears,  _et tu, Brute_? as he clutches fistfuls of your sweatshirt, bearing the name of an alma mater you never attended. "Why the  _hell_  would you do that?"

"He already figured it out, we ain't that subtle," you say sharply as you shrug him off, stung by the accusation, like you didn't know by now how to keep your secret close to the vest. "The rest of the country ain't as backwards as Oklahoma,  _Jesus_ , ain't that why we left?"

"Did he take it bad? That why you want to take off all of a sudden?"

"No,  _Jesus_ , he was fine with it." Ponyboy's giving you the old side-eye. "I just don't know what we're doin' here, killin' time."

"Bein' with you's like bein' with a butterfly sometimes." He kicks at the dust, creates a tiny, swirling tornado. "Always feel like you wanna fly away."

"That is the  _shittiest_  metaphor I've ever heard," you scoff, and elbow him so he cracks a smile— Pony always gets a kick out of your swearing, one bad habit your mama's Ivory in your mouth nearly cured you of. "I'm honestly embarrassed that the kid who produced Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Did Y'all Know I'm Really, Really Queer? came out with that lil' pearl of wisdom."

"You're always wantin' to run." He sticks his finger into his mouth to bite his nail— you fight the urge to scold him for it, tell him he'll get an infection for gnawing them into bloody tips. "Second you find somethin' halfway stable, you're turnin' the table over."

"Baby—" you drawl the word out so much, you might as well be Hank Williams in a cowboy hat, "I'm stupid for you. You know that, right?" You lean over to kiss his neck, suckle the translucent skin a little, enjoy the way he squirms too much. "Don't you get it, you're the constant here? I just want us to go somewhere else, somewhere better."

"You love me back when we first met?" He entwines himself with you like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, his arms around your neck, his open mouth hot on the stubble shadowing your jaw. He doesn't ever want to let you go. "You know that was it?"

No, you weren't in love with him when you were eighteen and he'd only just brushed the edge of fourteen with his fingertips— he was downright  _coltish_  despite his profound desire to be seen as an adult, all knees and elbows, his green-gray eyes still too big for the skull that contained them. He fascinated you, the boy who'd watched your best friend die, but you were far too selfish back then to consider him anything but a tool for your own spiritual awakening. Maybe you still are.

"Sure I did." The lie sits as smooth as vanilla ice cream on your tongue. "Minute I saw you."


End file.
